| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Stanislav_Pokorny |
Posted - 03/04/2009 : 09:04:49
We have got used to different professional and lobbying organizations. We have got used the pressure that is being exerted on translation prices. Some of us have submitted to this pressure to a greater, some of us to a lesser extent. Some heroes, and I am definitely not one of them, have not submitted to this pressure at all.
Now there's the Translation Automation Users Society (TAUS; www.translationautomation.com). The founding members of TAUS include the world’s largest translation agencies and their key accounts, such as Applied Language, Skøivánek, Moravia IT, Adobe or Microsoft.
The aim of TAUS is to achieve a dramatic drop in translation prices. This primary aim should be achieved through two basic concepts:
1. Pooling linguistic data, in other words, sharing translation memories;
2. Crowdsourcing (why not let the crowd translate if it’s for free and if the crowd likes the result?).
How is it going to work? Adobe, Microsoft etc. will create one large translation supermemory, or at least a few translation supermemories divided according to the different subjects. These supermemories will be made public through a web application interface. It has not yet been announced, whether the supermemories will be shared for free or against a subscription fee. However, I believe the latter will be the case.
These translation supermemories will grow with contribution from the crowd: crowdsourcing. Afterwards, these supermemories will be used to pretranslate new documents. Such a pretranslated document will be sent to the translator to revise the pretranslated parts and to translate the missing ones. It goes without saying that the revision will be poorly paid.
Here are some of my questions and concerns:
1. How about copyrights? If I translate my client’s document using a TAUS translation memory, will this be a violation of my client’s copyrights to the document I translated? I believe so.
2. How about quality? If the crowd is going to be used to contribute to the TMs, how will bad segments be removed? I think we all struggle from time to time with poor-quality TMs sent to us to work with. And such TMs are created by more or less qualified translators. Imagine what is going to happen, if the TMs are created/contributed into by the crowds!
3. How about responsibility? Imagine you are a plant manager and you buy a CNC machine. The translation of the operating manual was crowdsourced and contains severe mistakes. Imagine that following one of such mistakes the CNC machine chops a poor operator’s arm off. Who will be made responsible? The crowd?
4. How about payments? Active CAT users will surely confirm that to revise/proofread a translation is sometimes much worse than translating the document from the scratch. If I am to reword entire sentences, I will not be willing to accept a 30% rate just because the document has been pretranslated.
Maybe I am just being slightly paranoic, but my impression from the whole thing is, that TAUS wants to "convert" translators to poorly paid revisers. Do we have any chance to withstand such a pressure? I look forward to your opinions.
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